In a novel of extraordinary resonance and power, Charles Baxter takes us backward through the lives of Hugh and Dorsey Welch, a brother and sister born and raised in a small Michigan town. We meet them as adults - Dorsey , an eminent astrophysicist, Hugh a quiet unassuming Buick salesman in their hometown - and discover their pasts: difficult marriages, dark and destructive love affairs, moments of triumph, of disappointment, of sheer joy. As he traces their paths back to the day of Dorsey's birth, Baxter reveals the experiences that put such a distance between Hugh and Dorsey, and the ties of imperfect love that bind them together. And as Paul Auster has written, "gradually we begin to understand that Baxter is telling our own story, that this is how our own lives are formed within us." --Publisher.